Tuesday, 6 August 2013

Honoring a battle

Bangalore has a road network exceeding 3000 kilometres and
they consist of main and cross roads, ring roads, arterial and sub-arterial
roads.

A majority of the roads and
streets are named after personalities such as Kempe Gowda Mahatma Gandhi,
Rajaram Mohan Roy, Dr. Raj Kumar. Kasturba or they are named after institutions
such as RV Road (Rashtriya Vidyalaya), CMH (Chinmaya) and Race Course Road. A few roads are named
after the lakes adjacent to them like Dharmambudhi
Road, Sankey
Road.

However, there are only two
roads in Bangalore which are named after famous
wars that took place in British India.
Interestingly, neither of the wars took place in Bangalore or even Karnataka.

One of the wars involved
Major General Arthur Wellesley, who just four years earlier, had killed Tipu
Sultan in the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore war in Srirangapatna near Mysore. The other battle
took place almost forty years later.

Though the theatre of war in both the battles was thousands of
kilometers away from Bangalore,
the city had a close link with the events. Men and materials of the Madras
Engineering Group (MEG) had participated in both the battles and won laurels.
No wonder, both the roads are close to the MEG and training centre in Ulsoor.

These are the Assaye Road and
Meanee Avenue Road. Both these roads meet near the UlsoorLake
and both these events shaped Indian history and gave the British the upper
hand.Assaye Road,
which is the longer of the two roads, begins at the junction of Wheeler Road, Robertson Road and Buddha Vihar Road at
CoxTown.

Assay today is a small
village in Jalna district of Maharashtra. On September 23, 1803, the village
was the location where the British took on the Maratha confederacy during the Second
Anglo-Maratha War.

The East India Company was
led by Major General Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, and he defeated
a combined army of Daulat Rao Scindia of
Gwalior and the
Raja of Berar. The battle established British influence and power in Central
India and also added to Wellesley’s
reputation. The battle was so fierce that “The Iron Duke” as Wellesley was called, said that of all his
battles Assaye was “the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw”.

The battle lasted three hours
and it was won by Wellesley’s
coolness and inspiring leadership. The Thambis or MEG personnel played a vital
role in the battle. A road was named in their honor near Ulsoor and this is
today the Assay Road.

The other road in Bangalore named after a
battlefield is Meanee Avenue.
This is named after the Battle of Meanee (also spelt Miani). The Battle of
Meanee took place on February 17, 1843 between British forces under Sir Charles
Napier and the Talpur Amirs of Sindh, Pakistan.

Sir Charles defeated the
Baluchi army and this led to the British annexation of Sindh, now in Pakistan. Here
too, the MEG played an important role.
The MEG centre or Madras Sappers as they are popularly known, has its
headquarters near to these two roads. Today, the roads have changed and there
is very little to remind us about their history.

Apart from these two roads,
there are others such as Infantry
Road, Artillery
Road, Brigade
Road, Main
Guard Cross Road which have a close connection to
the military history of Bangalore.
In fact, the erstwhile Cantonment area, which was conceived in 1806, was the
place where the British billeted their troops and this was the second largest
Cantonment in India.